1.2 Land, Ambition, Maps
Supplement to Endnotes
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George’s family had personal, day-to-day experiences with the processes that maintained land as private property, something that garnered authority and legitimacy through local map making and surveying.
Before Cornelius Cole left for college, the “old gentleman,” Mr. Fowler, taught him how to survey land. Cornelius learned “the art” of using a magnetic compass, geometry, and conversion tables to establish roads and the private holdings of people in his town. When Fowler died, young Cornelius became the neighborhood’s surveyor. George’s older brother then got hold of a copy of Abel Flint’s Treatise on Surveying and without guidance from his father, puzzled through the exercises in a separate notebook. The “art” was closer to a science. In Flint’s Treatise, Cornelius found dozens of tables for natural tangents. There were traverse tables, logarithms and logarithmic sines with decimals carried to six figures.
The book recommended investing in the basic tools: a common chain, sometimes called a “Gunter’s chain” made up of 100 standardized links used to measure, and a compass based on “Rittenhouse’s construction.” (David Rittenhouse was a renowned instrument maker who had helped run border lines for various states. He made an ornate compass for President Washington whose early wealth had come from surveying and land speculation on the frontier. A young Abraham Lincoln also owned a Rittenhouse compass.)[1]
The “art" would have familiarized Cornelius and his assistants with the original boundaries from the Military Tract that had been laid upon Iroquois lands. By this time nearly India lands, laced with relics, had been sold and consolidated. The lots were originally supposed to go to New York’s deserving soldiers. But few of them did. Impoverished, swallowed up by fear and impatience, uncertain about their prospects, many New York veterans hawked their promised lots for a song to speculators. (Some soldiers, wise to the game, sold their lots multiple times.) Others died or had already sunk their hopes and labors into another plot of land. In the Cole family’s Seneca County, for example, of the three hundred lots, only four were occupied by the original soldier grantees -- two of them in the Coles’ village of Lodi.[2]
Cornelius’s surveying skills would have been needed to negotiate between the conflicting claims on land records -- the skein of original soldiers’ bounties, forged deeds, and the many disputes between speculators and squatters that had plagued the Military Tract since the lands were first parceled out through lottery.[3]
Survey maps promised clarity. They promised precision in regards to where one’s property stopped and started. Flint’s Treatise helped students like Cornelius learn how to precisely divide up and distribute lands according to wills, enter measurements into field-books, and “plot the field on paper, and calculate the area” by protracting a map. But, as the Treatise admitted, the maps would need God in their details. The earth and its landscape were less cooperative with mathematical certainties. Cornelius learned from his book that the magnetic needle, for all its utility, “cannot be relied on, when great accuracy is required.”
For that, Cornelius could consult tables for adjusting measurements for the “elongation of the North Star” according to the year and latitude.
The index further admitted that “diurnal variations” and local magnetic fields rendered the compass inexact. The variations were a “hidden mystery, which is never to be searched out by man. It is sufficient in itself, without any other evidence, to cause the reflecting mind to wonder at, admire, and adore the wisdom, knowledge, and power of HIM, who planned, and who still directs it." [4]
The book’s readers learned that no matter the lack of precision, or the inability to impose scientific order on once untamed Indian lands, God was behind the needle’s mystery.
Any surveyor like Cornelius would have understood that land, once taken by violence, could be converted into private possessions with the help of mathematical equations and the divinely directed needle. In this way surveyors performed their part in the nineteenth-century drama of extending empire from the Atlantic to the Pacific. “Winning the West” required men like Cornelius who learned how to see the natural world about them through a map’s lines.
Cornelius would have needed four or five assistants to help him trace and record those lines. His assistants would have helped him carry and extend the chains, tote flag staves, and wield an axe for clearing spaces. Besides this he needed help hauling a compass (probably of brass) with perpendicular sights, notebooks, conversion charts, and a Jacob’s staff (a tripod) on which to mount the compass.[5]
Maybe his younger brother, George, helped hold the chains. Perhaps George learned the art from his brother when Cornelius left for college. At the very least, George had a dear brother who learned how power in the American empire was made legitimate -- and men’s worth assessed-- with compass and measuring chains.
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